How to Begin a Website for Your New Business Part 3

Even though the tools look the same, designing a web page is not word processing or desktop publishing. What you see is not what you get. You ultimately load your site in HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language, which defines the structure of your document, not the formatting. The formatting is determined by your viewer’s browser, video card, monitor, and display resolution.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Test your Site on Different Browsers.
   There is no way to be certain how many surfers use one of the three major browsers. Install Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape on your computer and see how your site looks on all of them. You’ll be surprised at how each will display your site differently.
2. Design your site for speed.
   Earlier we covered some basics to keep in mind for handling photos, foremost among these being that you keep the file size of photos and graphics small. Here are some other pointers. Never use an image to convey what text can do just as well. For example, if you business stationery consists of a graphic and your company name in a distinctive font, forgo the distinctive font and get one as close as possible to be downloaded in text form.
   Another way to increase the speed of your page downloads is to shorten page lengths, with drill down links to other pages to furnish more details.
3. Avoid Frames.
   Frames are basically a way to display two different URL’s on one page. I was hired once as the desinger / webmaster of a local newspaper site. The publisher insisted on this design for the paper’s headline and a navigation bar. However, frames take longer to load and make it difficult to send links to specific pages.
4. Do Use Cascading Style Sheets.
   Cascading Style Sheets allow you to separate a document’s content, written in HTML from the presentation of the document’s colors, fonts, and layout as defined by a CSS. By employing them you can decrease the size of your site, permitting faster downloads. Web pages will stay consistent throughout your site. In fact, you can do a major remodeling of your site, but keep the underlying content of the site the same, but upgrading your CSS alone. To use Cascading Style Sheets, you’ll need a web design program like Dreamweaver.